The Cult Of Collaboration Is Killing Your Firm

Trending News: Why Being A Team Player Is Bad For Business

Why Is This Important?

Because everything you suspected about sharing a desk with Gavin from accounting is true.

Long Story Short

Collaboration is taking over the workplace. That much you know. What you didn’t know is that this may not be a good thing.

Long Story

It’s no secret collaboration is everywhere in the office. In 2016 work spaces are open, meetings are frequent, the silos are breaking down, and there’s zero opportunity to check your pr0n accounts without a manager busting your chops. It’s a brave new world, and you’re working as a team whether you like it or not.

But if you think that sounds like a sucky deal, you’re not alone. This week both the Economist and the Harvard Business Review have run illuminating stories on the cost of collaboration.

The figures are frightening. At many companies the proportion of time people spend in meetings, on the phone and responding to emails hovers around 80 percent. And while they are getting things done — in a manner of speaking — it’s leaving little time for all the critical stuff they were actually hired to do.

The HBR conducted research across 300 organizations and found that 20 to 35 percent of value-added collaborations were coming from only three percent of employees, putting significant pressure on their capacity to produce quality work.

TheEconomist report is evening more damning, referring to a growing body of research that suggests we’re stuck in a collaborative overload. Multitasking reduces the quality of work as well as dragging it out, while jumping from one task to another rapidly leads to attention residue (where the mind continues to dwell on the old task even as it tries to tackle the new).

Maybe the clearest criticism was the fact that managers are quick to measure the benefits of collaboration without taking account of the costs. One study calculated that a mid-size firm spent $1 million a year processing emails, while top collaborators become known for their enthusiasm, and are soon asked to weigh in on every issue — even as their much sort after sign-off creates bottlenecks in areas that aren’t their expertise.

Most of all, it makes what is known as ‘deep work’ almost impossible. Deep work is the bread and butter of the knowledge economy, when talented brains solve the problems that will give their firms a competitive advantage. Without deep work companies would come to a developmental standstill.

So, what can be done? Recognizing that unplugging is important and that employees have only a finite amount of time to tackle their work is key. Also, the top performers at a company aren’t necessarily the top collaborators, so leave them be to kick butt.

Anyway, together the stories make for illuminating reading. Check them out when you can get a moment to yourself. Which, in 2016, is never.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: What’s the solution? Commercial real estate is often at a premium so surely the answer isn’t more offices?

Disrupt Your Feed: Then again, maybe this is just a step towards people working remotely.

Drop This Fact: Every email at a mid-sized firm costs on average 95 cents to address.